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Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

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Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#131

Post by throwaway2037 »

kortilla wrote: post #124
bdcravens wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public companies have more external influences on their valuation. It's not like they literally lost 50-70% of their intrinsic value, only what the market with the associated psychology says they are worth. Private companies can stick closer to that intrinsic value.

Stock has very little to do with “intrinsic value”. The share price is what an investor is willing to bet on the future of the company improving. This is why companies with lousy future outlooks will sell for a lower price than their assets - debts. There is no intrinsic value that private companies can stick to. They just have the power of controlling sales so they take sellers out of the market until they get the p…

Yes, this is important. Stock price reflects future earnings growth potential. That's a mouthful(!), but consider if Google announced 0% growth in earnings, but still same profits. Their stock price would be crushed. This essentially happened to all major investment banks after 2008 crisis. When 30:1 leverage on balance sheet was no longer an option, forwarding looking earnings growth looked tiny compared to 2007.

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#132

Post by throwaway2037 »

mathattack wrote: post #83
bdcravens wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public companies have more external influences on their valuation. It's not like they literally lost 50-70% of their intrinsic value, only what the market with the associated psychology says they are worth. Private companies can stick closer to that intrinsic value.

Intrinsic value involves discounting future cash flows. With rates up that should punish Stripe similar to the rest of the market.

I see the term "intrinsic value" frequently used incorrectly. Mostly, it is used in finance to describe the value of an option when "in the money" (underlying is above/below strike price for call/put). Perhaps they means book value, which the value of the company if all assets and liabilities were sold at market prices. For most pure services companies, it is very low (perhaps negative due to liabilities), as the accounting rules for book value are very strict.

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#133

Post by throwaway2037 »

lxgr wrote: post #98
djbusby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used banks and cards to help resolve fraud. Rarely, but I love it. And now the bank pushed me to use Zelle - which has zero protection.

> [...] bank pushed me to use Zelle - which has zero protection. Also channeling patio11 [1]: This is actually a pretty interesting ongoing experiment as to whether banks can opt out of Regulation E. [1] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1500993875627761666

No kidding. Zelle looks so dangerous from consumer point of view. It is so easy to get scammed and almost impossible to be made whole. I am fine with Zelle if banking regulators require Reg E. The best part of Reg E: Since banks are almost completely responsible for fraud in their customers named, they take it very seriously!

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#134

Post by throwaway2037 »

methodical wrote: post #22
rglover wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, with Bitcoin.

And by using Bitcoin to automate all these transactions you get a bunch of very cool features such as constantly being at risk of losing your life savings due to phishing, scamming, hacking, etc., etc., etc. unless you store a hard wallet in your intestines and memorize the recovery words (better hope you don't forget any or your life savings is gone!). The cool thing about all of this is that it's a feature of Bitco…

This reply was excellent. This part really made me laugh:

    unless you store a hard wallet in your intestines and memorize the recovery words (better hope you don't forget any or your life savings is gone!)
To continue the "lulz", South American drug traffickers will soon be cutting those people open to extract their hard wallet!

Enough with the jokes! Real question: Sometimes you read about FBI chasing down ransomware groups and recovering Bitcoins. How do they do it? If they can identify the wallet, how do they lay claim? Do they find where the wallet is hosted and force exchange to transfer wallet to FBI?

Please don't read this post as an attempt to defend Bitcoin, nor say that FBI is a good way for me to reverse a fraudulent Bitcoin transaction!

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#135

Post by xur17 »

lxgr wrote: post #97
TekMol wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been paying and being paid for decades now, and I have never involved a payment processor in a dispute I had with the other side. If arbitration is the reason these companies exists, it seems like bad deal. Maybe they sell an illusion?

> I have been paying and being paid for decades now, and I have never involved a payment processor in a dispute I had with the other side. Have you considered that the possibility of disputes and the existence of a framework for resolving them is part of the reason for that?

But is paying 2-3% on each transaction worth it for that?

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#136

Post by lxgr »

xur17 wrote: post #135
lxgr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have been paying and being paid for decades now, and I have never involved a payment processor in a dispute I had with the other side. Have you considered that the possibility of disputes and the existence of a framework for resolving them is part of the reason for that?

But is paying 2-3% on each transaction worth it for that?

Dispute resolution is not where the 2-3% go (as evidenced by disputes also existing on US debit cards, where it's 0.05%, and EU credit and debit cards, where it's 0.3% and 0.2% respectively).

Some of it is spent by the issuer on fraud expenses that they are assigned liability for, but given the same reasoning as above, if that was more than 0.05%, there wouldn't be any profitable debit issuers left in the US (and similarly for the EU, although the regulator is changing the fraud calculus there significantly by enforcing strong cardholder authentication, so it's not an apples to apples comparison).

In other words, if there was political will to get rid of credit card points in the US, we could have all of this for much cheaper. (We might need to look into scheme fees too while we're at it, e.g. by finding a market solution that creates actual competition there.)

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#137

Post by sodality2 »

rglover wrote: post #107
lxgr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The guy who shows up to your intro meeting [...] Do you regularly hold in-person intro meetings for ordering sub-$100 items online? > Go work for someone else to build up credentials/experience, or, offer to do stuff for free in exchange for referrals and testimonials. And then passport it to my own store how, exactly? "Trust me, I'm honestseller897 on Amazon/eBay"? >> on a centralized platform that can arbitrate t…

> Do you regularly hold in-person intro meetings for ordering sub-$100 items online? Of course not but you can use the same heuristic by looking at the presentation of what's being sold. Just like in-person, it will be obvious. The only exception would be if you're doing something dubious which already has risks. > And then passport it to my own store how, exactly? "Trust me, I'm honestseller897 on Amazon/eBay"? I do…

> Of course not but you can use the same heuristic by looking at the presentation of what's being sold.

Which works until the scammers begin making nice websites. They already do, not sure if you've noticed - phishing sites typically look almost identical to the target site. I've even seen known scam shopping sites look completely legitimate. Stripe lookalike checkout page, with full emulation of every behavior of the page, address look up, the whole nine yards. The reason why it's not worse than it currently is, is because CC theft is not as easy as it could be, if it were all crypto (irreversible transactions + immediate theft that can be shuffled around within seconds and hidden).

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#138

Post by arcticbull »

alasdair_ wrote: post #122
arcticbull wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also usually a switch from ISO to NSO somewhere down the line, often fairly early. NSOs aren't capped at a 90 day post-termination exercise window. Some companies have extended the window to as much as 7 years - Pinterest comes to mind. There is a cap, but it's closer to the RSU cap than the ISO cap. The progression is usually: - Founders get shares with a re-purchase option for vesting. The company exercises…

>Some companies have extended the window to as much as 7 years Niantic did 10 years as far back as 2015.

That's great to hear, I'll be sure to keep that in mind if I answer this question in the future.

It seemed to be popular to do for a minute there after Pinterest did it, then I didn't really hear about it again.

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#139

Post by rglover »

sodality2 wrote: post #137
rglover wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you regularly hold in-person intro meetings for ordering sub-$100 items online? Of course not but you can use the same heuristic by looking at the presentation of what's being sold. Just like in-person, it will be obvious. The only exception would be if you're doing something dubious which already has risks. > And then passport it to my own store how, exactly? "Trust me, I'm honestseller897 on Amazon/eBay"? I do…

> Of course not but you can use the same heuristic by looking at the presentation of what's being sold. Which works until the scammers begin making nice websites. They already do, not sure if you've noticed - phishing sites typically look almost identical to the target site. I've even seen known scam shopping sites look completely legitimate. Stripe lookalike checkout page, with full emulation of every behavior of th…

This is a legitimate concern, but there's a business to be built here.

I could see some sort of popup or embed that the actual company can put on their site that can only be validated via DNS. Then, users can look for that and have it validate the company by having the service email the user from the authentic domain, via that popup's backend. If the popup can't validate that the email sent via the vendor is from the validated domain, it rejects it and sends a warning back to the buyer that the site isn't authentic. The business being to mitigate spoof attempts on the behalf of sellers and building trust with customers.

Make it simple enough for any seller to use and you incentivize sales by being a "BlorgTron Validated Seller."

All of these problems have solutions, they just (likely) don't exist yet. We're effectively entering a "financial industrial revolution," and just like back then, new solutions will be required to move forward. That doesn't make Bitcoin bad, it just needs the missing services layered on top (identical to the existing banking system).

Re: Stripe sets one-year timetable to decide on going public

#140

Post by dzikimarian »

TimPC wrote: post #112

It’s honestly perplexing that so many tech companies have stayed private for such a long period of time. Especially in an era of rising interest rates and rising mortgage costs, people really want to be able to sell their stock. The difference between packages with equity you can sell and equity you can’t sell is gargantuan and there are massive benefits to having a public price that lets people fairly value that equ…

What's perplexing for me is that, yesterday on HN I've seen crowd with pitchforks demanding CEOs of publicly traded companies to be laid off, along with the employees for giving up to the pressure of shareholders.

Today I'm seeing ton of comments about how company has to go public, because otherwise employees (who have excellent compensation apart from stock) will have to wait a few months to liquidate their assets.

Seems like certain altitude doesn't come with MBA title, like some want to believe :-)

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